Game-sauna

By Max Lavysh

In 1526 a rain-soaked Portuguese captain, Dom Jorge de Menezes, shouted into a monsoon wind, pointing at an island in the distance: a safe haven for his small but plucky vessel of exploration and the men on board. Days later he named the island 'Papua', and a new land edged its way onto European maps.

In May 2012, Bethesda Softworks LLC announced the release of Elder Scrolls Online. The game takes as its starting point the land of Tamriel, a large landmass in the fictional world of Nirn, about which little is known ...

The people of Tamriel are diverse: Its hominid population made up of talking lizards, talking cats, elves, orcs and a variety of human races. The races are typically characterised by boons and shortfalls. The black Redguards are ‘athletic’, the dark-eyed Bretons poetic and passionate, while the Nords evoke a bluff and blond-haired gusto.

The land of Papua was claimed for the Spanish Crown in 1545 and, since then, the land has struggled beneath a neo-European yoke. The colourful plumes of its indigenous 'Bird of Paradise' became popular in Europe as adornments for hats, and the bird was hunted close to extinction.

Many myths grew up about the bird, prompted by depictions of the east given in accounts such as 'The travels of Sir John Mandeville' and 'The Alexander Romance'. The pseudonymous John Mandeville fleshed out the well known legend of the Phoenix.

Although he claimed to have located it in Egypt it was for this creature that the bird of paradise was initially mistaken. The creature was later believed to have originated in the ‘Terrestrial Paradise’ - the Garden of Eden as purportedly witnessed by Alexander the Great - and from this belief the name by which it is now known arose.

The assumptions of western Europe were applied to the radically new, and so it was incorporated into that culture’s world picture.  

Games such as Elder Scrolls Online can be said to comprise a vast untapped potential of sorts, and one which the explorers of the 15th and 16th centuries may have had trouble understanding. In the same way, however, we see the myths and simplifications of our dominant culture being hastily pasted onto the worlds and behaviours of the new. On a surface level Elder Scrolls Online (as with its predecessors) is characterised by a patchwork of Tolkien-esque tropes underpinned by a theology making more than a passing nod to the Lovecraft mythos. But in other senses the ideas of 21st century western culture have also been mapped across. The dubious 'characteristics' of the human races in Tamriel, for example, can be seen to reflect a range of knee-jerk prejudices redolent of our time. The free market, in Tamriel, is as much a part of the world as the weather systems.

By Jürgen Boon

The 1980s represented, for many people, a golden era of video-gaming. The initial arcade surge of inspiration met with the vast potential of the home and created a fertile environment for games creativity. A 38 year old man, in 2017, might be caught gazing from an office window. ‘What is the matter?’ a colleague queries. ‘Oh, nothing’ the man says. ‘I was just thinking of Golden Axe’.

By the time the 1980s had closed the video game industry had moved away from the malls and side-streets to become situated squarely in the consumer’s front room. Pizzas would be purchased from take-away outlets or greedily pulled from supermarket shelves. Sales executives from snack food manufacturers could be seen slyly tapping the sides of their noses as a generation of sedentary, Wotsit-eating, gamers took their place in the video-gaming mainstream. For many, though, the best days had gone.

The longing for video-games past, today, can be seen playing out in many ways. In 2013 Nintendo released NES Remix for their Wii-U console which was an unabashed paean to 8-bit gameplay. Retro-gaming museums, such as the  Computerspielemuseum in Berlin have sprung up across Europe, and conventions such as the Classic Gaming Expo attract throngs of enthusiasts with hooded tops, Pac-Man key-rings and the like. The scene grows in popularity.

But what might this nostalgia say about video-games and the people who play them? During an interview with www.mashable.com, Nolan Bushnell made the claim that modern games had become ‘gratuitously complex’, comparing early video-games to the game of chess. Indeed, modern games franchises such as Grand Theft Auto and the Elder Scrolls series have been characterised by complex worlds with ambiguous goals and a vast freedom through which to pursue them. In one sense players are invited to create these games as they go. Although many such games have endings to which players nominally work these vary according to the way each player plays the game, with all manner of behaviours typically permitted.

The Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard was not a video-games pundit but, in ‘The concept of anxiety’, published in 1844, he described a scene which can perhaps be applied to modern games and the retro-gaming phenomenon: A chasm appears and, at the top of this, a man stands, gazing into its depths. This man feels trepidation, not because he thinks he might fall, but because he thinks he might willingly cast himself in: A head-swimming anxiety arises as he comes face to face with the notion that he has the freedom to do whatever he wants …..

Of course Kierkegaard would be chased out of town for suggesting this as a  metaphor. And correctly so, because a player could walk his or her in-game proxy off a cliff many times and not feel any the worse for it. But the freedom offered in modern games can prompt gamers to question their own values. The debates surrounding game behaviour in the Grand Theft Auto series are clear examples of this. These games celebrate a kind of moral ambiguity and provide opportunities for what would be alarming transgressions in the day to world. Perhaps the simple games of the past are appealing to those who look to escape such ambiguity.

‘Sleep is Death’, released by Jason Rohrer in 2010, appears to be a clear example of such a game, with 8-bit looks setting it apart from many modern releases. But this game, as well as any, exemplifies the trend for free agency in the modern video-games scene. In Sleep is Death a player can create the world that he or she plays: Two players engaging online, with one creating the rules and actions of the game, as the other responds. The game speaks to a feeling of nostalgia for the past but, in asking the players to make the rules and create the game as they go, it is 100 percent modern.

And perhaps this is where the future lies. The basic rule-based games of the past are gone; their simple parameters having now passed. Yet simple games can still exist, with complexity constructed through a meaningful co-operation with others.

Or not. I don’t know …

By Ianto Brychan The Souls series is rather odd. Developed in Japan, the game-play and settings are more typical of Western Role Playing Games. Forsaking turn-based systems (with the arguable exception of the stamina gauge) the action is direct and physical. Populated by dragons, knights and creations inspired by the model work of Ray Harryhausen, the games can appear to be a hackneyed journey through the more exotic outposts of Arthurian legend. Western fantasy's influence is clear and Hidetaka Miyazaki, the series' lead developer, has cited the Fighting Fantasy books as an inspiration. As a child he devoured fantasy novels but admits that sections remained opaque as his English was not good enough. These gaps were filled by his imagination and this creativity has become the core of the Souls games' narrative design. Each game tells a deep and heartbreaking story of hubris and disaster but this is hidden away in item descriptions, conversations and certain scenes found in the world. The bodies hung in Boletaria Castle and items found nearby illuminate Stockpile Thomas's past, for example, but lack resolution as they raise as many questions as answers. The world is not explained through lengthy cut-scenes or by the ransacking of a library of lore books. Hidetaka Miyazaki empowers the player to invest in the story or ignore it completely. It is not essential to the gaming experience but enriches it immeasurably as the player must seek it out and make their own conclusions. This approach is often raised as a criticism, as inattention can remove motivation, however the healthy and vocal Souls community's continued and energetic efforts to discover new secrets and the stories they tell displays a grand appetite for this approach and reciprocal respect for the developers' ambitions. As Anton Chekhov wrote: 'Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.'

A rum fellow

Such an approach is precious as it is rare. Gaming has moved a long way from the glory days of the eccentric bedroom developer. Budgets have ballooned to compare with Hollywood's greatest excesses and this level of investment has necessitated a reduction of risk. Studios have responded with a plethora of sequels and simplistic narrative structures. Familiarity sells while mystery and strangeness are niche. The Souls series offers a different path which represents a more involved and personal approach. Computer games differ from other media as they encompass agency and the Souls games firmly place the responsibility for exploration and discovery in the player's hands. They are a graveyard for the aspirations of other games as the quality of the experience is so high they pale in comparison for a long time following completion. The game-play is visceral and deep, the worlds are exquisitely constructed and the stories are told with confident panache. They do not require maps and compasses and the developers delight in their content but feel no need to lead the player by the hand. They are adventures in the truest sense of the word.

This appeals to me as my gaming passions revolve around RPGs - games where you play a role and can thereby construct a back story and motivation for your murderous little man. The fact that I once found myself aggrieved as Wales had ignored my career mode footballer, despite his 20 goals in ten games in the Premiership, shows how deeply my need for a unifying narrative goes and the level of investment games can engender. I enjoy games that give you the space to decide your own motivations and the Souls realise this better than anything else in gaming. Many of the RPG big hitters have abandoned this mode of storytelling by giving you the proscribed role of saviour. You wake up after the mother of three day benders and some wizened old crone tells you are the chosen, the main man - the numero uno - so you'd better get off your aris and sort out those big bad boys over yonder. All well and good, of course, but it's not something I've ever really bought into - especially as such games destroy any sense of urgency by letting you wander off to the garage to pick up some Twixes while the world burns. Now I'm sure this is the point where somebody will pipe up to say that the trip to the garage is the opportunity to create a personal narrative as not everyone likes Twixes – they are rather bland – and perhaps they'd prefer some crisps and dips. Fair enough – but my point is that the gap between your role as the messiah and all this sideshow busywork is too great to really believe. Jesus loved to party – of course he did – he utterly dominated the dance-off at the wedding in Cana, but he never took his eyes off the prize and certainly didn't ride into Jerusalem with his donkey overladen with freshly smithed iron daggers.

The Souls games grab this saviour chic and throttle the life out of it. You are told that you are chosen but it's a lie. From the first moment the world throngs with a multitude of ghostly others playing out their own story. No-one in the world likes you – even the friendly ones think you're a mook to be played – and the narrative speaks of the futility of it all as nothing ever really changes. You are just another cog in the machine and it will grind on regardless. It goes further than this and utterly devalues the difference between good and bad intentions. You meet a host of characters who have tried to heal the world before you only to be corrupted and undone. Perhaps they have been defeated by overwhelming despair or the realisation that their personal conception of their importance is a cruel cosmic joke but they end up just as hollowed and cruel as those who've tried to profit and dominate for their own ends. The best example of this is Astraea who, unable to reconcile her faith with the despair she has witnessed, becomes a demon to save the abandoned and abused souls of the Valley of Defilement. Another instance is Siegmeyer of Catania who loses his self-worth as he is repeatedly saved by the player. Unable to accept these blows to his honour he is deprived of purpose and, apparently not for the first time, dies at the hands of his daughter in Ash Lake. Motive is meaningless in such a world but consequence is everything. The Souls series does not deal with morality and mocks our investment in the self. Go ahead and construct your fortress of significance but be prepared to watch it crumble and fall over and over again. Deprived of this narrative crux the player must decide their role in the world for themselves. I personally find this liberating.

New Londo Ruins: Haunted ...

The player will meet a variety of characters in the games. They provide an insight into other paths and other stories. Prince Ostrava represents the timid player, unwilling to proceed without assistance and is crushed by the truth. The Crestfallen Warrior is the player who simply cannot continue and lurks in the Nexus until he gradually fades away. Blood-soaked Lautrec is the red invader and abides by his own agenda. Solaire is the co-operative player but even he discovers his might insufficient in the face of his obsessions. The armour sets for all starting classes can be discovered with their owners' corpses throughout all three games and demonstrate how others have faltered before you. Original sin is writ large as all have failed. The only remaining source of light is the player, a fragile, flickering flame all too easily snuffed out by despair and frustration. This is the magic of the Souls as every layer and level of design reinforces the essential game mechanics. The undead cannot die but gradually hollow with every death until nothing is left. Anyone who's cursed as the Maneaters kill them for the umpteenth time can sympathise with this fate. You will die many times but failure only comes when you surrender. The undead with a purpose cannot hollow. The Souls games are difficult. It is their thing, is it not? Boxes emblazoned with 'Prepare to Die', tutorials that melt your face and huge bloody monsters with pig-stickers the size of Belgium who'll merrily smash you into the ground on your first date. They possess a near vertical learning curve and can still embarrass a veteran that gets too cocky. Everything wants to kill you and delights in expressing this ambition. I'm not going to argue that these games are easy but I feel this focus on difficulty somewhat misses the point. The games certainly make demands of the player but difficulty in computer games is often derived from unfairness. It is in the arcade DNA as games were originally designed to kill the player as the coin-slot needed to be fed. The Souls (barring a few exceptions like the thoroughly awful archers of Anor Londo) are not unfair. Rather, the games place a certain expectation on the player – an expectation that must be respected if you are to progress. Souls games demand your attention. Whether it's the pattern of a boss's attacks, that slight shrug he does before unleashing the two handed slash of ghastliness , or simply that the hole is still there in Boletaria castle and you'll end up just as dead even if you're in NG++, you have to play in the moment, body and soul. This again is a marked contrast to most RPGs where judicious grinding will make you a feckless god of war absent mindedly devastating the grand Daemons of Generica with your bastard sword of Bastard +11. The Souls are different as you do not become competent simply by pouring souls into your character's attributes or even by reinforcing your weapons – you become competent by knowing the world and its denizens. The games teach you to fear crowds, narrow corridors, heights, fog gates and treasure chests (and also have fun playing on this fear), and ingrain an environmental awareness into the player that would make George Monbiot weep. I can remember the first level in Boletaria (except for that damn hole) like the path home from my primary school. This level of attention is important as it allows the intensity of detail necessary for the player to construct their story. Knowing your way about is only the start, of course, and gradually you begin to realise that the world is friendlier than you think. The ghosts of other players provide a kind of companionship and the blood splattered evidence of their demise provide clues to what's coming next – even if it tends to be swift and brutal death. However, it goes deeper than that. Suddenly you're opening short-cuts and finding sweet loot seemingly tailored to your needs. NPCs and other players can give you a hand with bosses (if you're into that kind of thing – see below) and you begin to mount the insurmountable. As if by magic your attention is rewarded and the skills you've almost unconsciously developed and your determination to go that little bit further allow you to climb your own personal Eiger. Of course, this being Souls, you're then dumped in the foothills of K2 and the whole process begins again. Attention brings reward is a lesson you must learn early and learn often. Many RPGs boast of huge worlds but too many become a blur of green and brown upon completion. I raided innumerable dungeons and caves in Skyrim but they remain a melange of dreary zombies and rows of grey coffins in my mind's eye. The level of challenge offered by the Souls games unsettles the player and imbues each moment with tension. They demand and engage your full attention and imprint themselves on your imagination.

A terrible crow

I've referred to story a number of times and I'd like to illustrate my own. I play the Souls series a certain way. It is my stand against the hollowing and the bones of my own personal tale. The levels in a Souls game represent purgatory and progress and enlightenment must be earned. I feel this is best expressed as a lone warrior matching his hard-won skills against the dark: Hiding away, ejaculating magic spells, or plunking away with arrows pales in comparison and the Souls games burn brightest when you meet the foe head-on and toe to toe. This is the keystone of my ballad. This is reflected in the lore as all magic - whether sorcery, miracles, pyromancy or dark - is derived from demonic power and the sorrow of others. Much like Havel however my confidence in this story's righteousness has led to error and sin as I have subsequently equated magic with dishonour. This has been especially reinforced by Demon's Souls' magic wielding Royal, (or ‘easy mode’ as it has been named) and it's a preconception I've struggled to shake off. I admit that this is judgemental and unfair. I have mellowed from the certainties of foolish youth so please don't take what I say to heart. Play the Souls the way you enjoy them. I understand that every Souls player creates his or her own story and the glimpses offered of others and their different journeys should be cherished. The games can be approached in any number of ways and that is their point. The seemingly brutal world offers succour for all players and the best way to take advantage is your decision alone. However be assured you'll get a pig-sticker in the chops if you ever come into my world and spam that fancy-Dan nonsense. Below are my personal rules of Souls. They are for me and no-one else.

All challenges can be beaten if you apply blunt trauma with sufficient vigour.

A first play-through is as pristine and magical as virgin snow. Why sully it with a wiki?

You'll never hear the music of the Souls unless you defeat the bosses on your own.

I'm not running away - how dare you - I am retreating tactically.

By Robert Simpson

The traditional cybercafé has been around for years, however with the growing popularity of e-sports there are some young pretenders looking to capitalise on its success.

Fraggers is a gaming café (currently no alcohol license) in Altrincham, South Manchester. What is clear about Fraggers upon entering is that this is a place you go to in order to game. It is split over three floors with 25 PCs, four console stations, three large TVs and a projector. These systems offer a huge range of games from Counter-Strike to Guitar Hero. You name it, they have it.

Fraggers charges customers per hour to use these systems and this is its primary revenue stream. It has a range of soft drinks as well as a food menu to provide sustenance for gaming sessions that can potentially last several hours. At weekends it offers a lock-in with gamers often found to still be going until the wee hours. The Fraggers model is to attract gaming enthusiasts from the local area and so to build up a friendly, loyal community.

Fraggers, in Altrincham, Manchester

Meltdown is a gaming bar situated on Caledonian Road, not far from Kings Cross Station in London. The Meltdown set up allows it to potentially cater to a broader audience than Fraggers. With just two PCs and an Xbox 360 in the corner it is not necessarily somewhere you can rock up to and expect to be able to play at immediately. Meltdown does allow customers to hook up their own laptops however it simply doesn’t have the volume of hardware compared to Fraggers. It is more like a conventional pub. With screens around the bar showing Twitch feeds it can be thought of as more an e-sports bar than a conventional LAN café. It’s promoted as somewhere people can go and have a drink with friends and spectate competitions as well as play themselves. There is no food available however Meltdown do allow customers to bring in their own food and eat it there. The Meltdown model relies on customers spending money on drinks for its primary source of income.

Meltdown, at King's Cross, London

The main focus of Meltdown and Fraggers is on the Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) genre, in particular League of Legends (LoL) and Defence of the Ancients 2 (DOTA2), although StarCraft2 (SC2) features prominently too. This has clearly been identified as the core market the new breed of cybercafés wish to attract in order to succeed and, given their popularity and the audiences they draw worldwide, it’s not hard to see why. In both Meltdown and Fraggers these are the games you will see most people playing and the ones being shown on the big screens. These games, however, are not for everyone (including myself). The MOBA titles in particular have a community with a reputation for hostility towards new players, which is not ideal for a business looking to build itself around the community concept.

So how do Meltdown and Fraggers hope to increase their customer base?

Well, one idea both establishments have hit upon is to offer workshops for new LoL and DoTA2 players. These workshops allow new players to learn the basics in a friendly environment, hopefully helping them to improve and so to keep returning. They also put on tournaments for games outside the e-sport umbrella, which is what drew me to Meltdown. The evening I attended had a retro-Nintendo theme, with tournaments for Bomberman on the SNES, Mario Kart 64 and Super Smash Brothers Melee throughout the night. It was well organised by an enthusiastic host (dressed as Nick Fury) with little to no delay between rounds. Most importantly it drew a large crowd with plenty of people getting their cosplay on. It had a brilliant atmosphere with a load of people brought together through a mutual interest in gaming: A little different to my usual evening at the pub but very entertaining and something I would absolutely go to again.

Fraggers also puts on tournaments, however its location in a town in South Manchester means it can’t draw on the same scale of potential customers available to Meltdown. This is likely to be the biggest challenge it faces.

Both establishments also allow customers to book their venues for private events. This could potentially make for an incredibly important source of revenue as it guarantees people through the doors and spending money.

For both Meltdown and Fraggers marketing will be the key to success. Both currently rely mainly on word of mouth with little web presence outside of Facebook. A decent website is the very least an establishment based around gaming should be aiming for. For me, the best way to get people down to their venues is the one-off tournaments and private events. It gets people down as groups which people may find less intimidating and, assuming they have good times, should hopefully lead to them returning or at the very least increasing awareness by word of mouth.

By Craig Smith

Video games. That time honoured recreational tradition of Generation Y. A pastime that exists often to engage, occasionally to inform but always to entertain. But has that always been true? Do games always entertain? Of course there have been, and always will be, those games that are nothing but a slog to play through: Those bad games that are generally frustrating in their limitations; the disappointment and frustration of what could have been. But an increasing trend in the modern games market is for those games that frustrate by design; that test you to your absolute limits and then push you a little bit further. What was once smoothed out and airbrushed over by games developers in order to streamline, is now being focused, refined and made as prickly as can be, all in an effort to test the true skill of the player. This is not necessarily a new trend. This brand of gaming philosophy was prevalent in the early days of arcade and console gaming. Games like Donkey Kong and Defender pushed early gamers to the brink - perhaps borne out of necessity - to increase challenge and the need to replay. This was especially the case with arcade games, with an insistence for the coins of your next go, to keep the companies in business. But then the console boom came along and changed things. Games became more cinematic and thoughtful experiences, as the systems they were created for became more powerful and easier to tell stories on. Demon’s Souls

So what explains this resurgence in difficult games? Games like Demon’s Souls? This arrived in 2009, to no fanfare, and not only expected but insisted on its players struggling. It made very little attempt to inform players on how to play and almost no attempt to outline why they should be taking such actions. Here is a modern day version of Adventure where you are expected to find your own way. Demon’s Souls is open for you to tackle in any manner or order you choose fit, after vanquishing the first boss. Here’s the trick though: The gamer is treated with respect. You are not left to fend for yourself with a by-the-numbers combat system. You are given a complex system that expects you to learn its depths. Enemies will not give you time or quarter if you are not up to the task of facing them. Deaths are common, but they do not come cheaply or unfairly. You know why you died and each death becomes a lesson. Communities sprang up to converse and collectively reveal the game’s secrets: Another trend in an age of social networks. These communities have revived the once dead leaderboard, with everyone competing for the top spots. The cream rises to the top with the help of platforms like YouTube and Twitch, where the very best can show off their skills and collect millions of devout online followers, pushing them to celebrity status.

Spelunky

'Roguelike' games can perhaps be seen as one of the most rapidly expanding sub-genres prescribing the notion of frustration for fun. One of the most prominent and popular examples, Spelunky, has taken this idea and ran away with it. A game with very simple controls and an even simpler objective, Spelunky has emerged as one of the most complex and challenging games in recent memory. It has secrets that are still being uncovered up to two years after its initial release. What seems like a basic platformer, with curt nods to Indiana Jones, evolves into layer upon layer of intricate design and unyielding challenge. Yet with every death (and the game is clear to point out exactly how these happen) the player tells themselves 'just one more go', the four words that every games developer is looking to hear. What starts as an ordinary foray into a game can expand into a breathless quest for progress: To unlock the game's secrets, to reach Hell and see the entirety of the game as the developer wished.

Value for money

You could argue that there are socio-economic factors in the increase of challenge in games today. Perhaps the state of the economy is leading consumers to become more discerning with their entertainment purchases. They may be looking to squeeze more out of the games they are buying, therefore prompting the developers to think smarter and so create richer games offering more re-playability if they are to garner the ever lucrative gaming market’s money. Gone are the days when new games were released by the bucketload, with consumers consuming the games in short time frames, before move on to the next. Few games stuck with that audience, and the ones that did either had the budget and scope that very few games could match (the Grand Theft Auto series) or the subtle challenge and infinite re-playability that the marquee online multiplayer games could offer (Halo, Call of Duty and FIFA). When you buy a game now, it is inherently a value proposition. A game like Infamous: Second Son may only offer 15-20 hours of single player gaming before its expended, compared to Titanfall, which can provide an almost limitless amount of value, if only in multiplayer online matches. That value is not just a multiplayer monopoly though. We come back to the Souls series and with its third iteration, Dark Souls 2, many gamers are finding more than enough provided for their time. It is a game with multiplayer elements, but it is inherently supposed to be experienced alone. The concept of completion is abstract to From Software, its developers. Complete the game, in the traditional sense, and you are expected to proceed and start again in what’s commonly known as New Game +. Start the game again, but in the state that you finished it, and face the game with new challenges, harder enemies and even entirely new items and things to see. But it doesn’t end there. There is NG++, NG+++ and as far as you think you can go.

Challenge and adversity

By Francis Dignan

Within the last 18 months we have seen the release of three new consoles from the usual suspects, with three vastly different approaches to marketing. The most pertinent issue, though, is that, so far, success in this generation, and towards the end of the last, has been solely down to marketing position and strategy, and has had very little to do with quality or innovation. Is this the fault of marketing? Or are gamers their own worst enemy and too risk averse, by nature, to take risks on niche products?

The Wii U

The Nintendo Wii U was positioned as a move back towards the company’s core market. The issue was that their largest market at that particular point was the casual Wii owning audience, but many members of this had 1) forgotten that they owned Wiis in the first place and 2) no idea that the Wii U was actually a different console to the original machine. Add to this the fact that the core audience had become disillusioned with the brand due to a perception that they were being seen as surplus to requirements and the release became a marketing nightmare. Nintendo had first ignored the core audience with the Wii, and then performed an about-turn to ignore the rest. There was no balance at any point. This, in turn, put off third party developers and what we see now is a struggling console which Nintendo still staunchly refuses to expose or advertise. The Wii U does actually innovate, in terms of input method, and the remote play idea has been copied wholesale, just as their motion control was. Remote play, however, is a hard sell and divides the living room, in contrast to the Wii, which brought the living room together.

So there’s innovation, and no marketing; good games and exclusives, but no adverts. As a result, sales have been way below hopes and expectations.

The Xbox One

Another marketing disaster beckoned. At E3 Microsoft sought to let everyone know that physical media was dead. Gone were the days of trade-ins and the taking of games to friends houses. There was uproar: Riots in the basements of family homes all over the world. Dissent was so loud that Microsoft swiftly backed down, and reverted to the more traditional model of games packaged with physical media, in order to appease the masses. This was sort of admirable but, at the same time, misguided, as the change Microsoft sought to implement would be sure to occur at some point down the line anyway. The company alienated a large number of gamers for no reason whatsoever.

With the Xbox One marketing determined the whole nature of the console, or at least, perceptions of the potential market did. For better or worse Microsoft tried to innovate, and there were some solid ideas around game sharing (who takes games to friends houses anymore anyway?) These, however, were shouted down by the community. Because of the company’s initial strategy, and about turn, they lost trust, with it sales, and now the ‘bone (terrible name) is struggling.

The PS4

With the PS4 Sony were presented with an open goal - having seen the reaction to the Xbox One approach - and they duly scored. E3 was a huge success (success at E3 largely dictating the sales and general goodwill to any particular brand until the next one rolls around). Sony marketed the PS4 as a PS3, turned up to 11. Or 4. What’s more, the gaming masses loved it. After being presented with a controller no one really knew how to make the most of, and a console which wanted to watch you watching TV on it, marketing a console squarely for gamers was a logical choice; a guaranteed route to success. And rightly so. You can’t underestimate the importance of having the option of a traditional console in the face of endless touch screen focused and Android friendly minigames.

Here, though, there is no innovation. There is a camera system nicked from Microsoft, a touchpad on the controller which would, in some cynical circles, be compared to that of the DS and Wii U. Motion control … Trophies… Everything that has been done before, but in one place, and shinier. Now there is absolutely nothing wrong with this, but, six months on, people who own the PS4, and the Xbox, and even the three Wii U owners, might be asking ‘is this it?

It’s all our fault

All three consoles have been rushed out. There is not a single game which pushes any sort of boundary in the same way that Mario 64, Wipeout, Fez, Halo, Uncharted or any number of last generation games did, in their own ways. In fact, there are barely any games to play. But, in spite of this, the PS4, at least, is selling in droves.

And this is what kills innovation. Manufacturers know that they don’t need a finished product, just a popular one. The safe bet, in this industry, always wins. That’s why Call of Duty tops the charts every year; why FIFA does the same. And why there are so many minor classics that will never see a sequel, as their sales are dwarfed by the aforementioned juggernauts.